Below the Belt Nibbles the Corporate Hand That Feeds
Richard Dresser's Below the Belt plays at ACT Theatre, 700 Union St., Thurs. 7:30, Fri. & Sat. 8, Sun. 2 & 7:30; tix $40-$55/$10/$15.
Judd Hirsch as Hanrahan in "Below the Belt" at ACT. Photo by Chris Bennion.
Hanrahan (Judd Hirsch) is a wise-cracking ass fond of mordant humor and incapable of either tact or diplomacy. His career on the skids due to his bad attitude, he's stuck working as a "checker" (basically quality control) at a manufacturing compound in an unnamed foreign country. Dobbitt (in another fine turn by Seattle favorite R. Hamilton Wright), the new checker on the team, is a bit of a bumbling bootlicker with good intentions, set up to be Hanrahan's comic foil. The two of them are stuck living together in substandard conditions, working long hours to push out an order of...something (they never quite figure out what), while being terrorized by their incompetent but emotionally needy boss, Merkin (John Proccacino). The first half features Dobbitt and Hanrahan trading barbs until they come to a mutual understanding, only to have the new-found camaraderie undermined by Merkin's inhuman tactics in service of company goals.
The play feels like it wants to be a satiric excoriation of corporate life, but never manages to take more than a couple limp-wristed swings. There's definitely an undercurrent of little-guy rage. At one point, Merkin states with hideous self-satisfaction that, "Any man can work; it takes a great man to check work." But all that rage is subsumed by the play's tedious attempt to find an emotional core. All three of these Americans are far from home and family, and that puts strain on those relationships. They're all lonely, in other words, and this, apparently, makes them sympathetic. Not in real life, mind you—we've all met the miserable sort of person who puts work above family, friends, and personal well-being, and our sympathy is usually reserved for the people they neglect. But in theatre-land, this is what passes for finding the humanity in your characters (since of course they wouldn't be worthy of human sympathy otherwise), and the story suffers for it.
There are precious few playwrights who really seem to understand corporate culture (Neil LaBute being the best of them), and Dresser isn't one to judge by Below the Belt. In fact, there's a slightly insulting undertone to the whole thing—everybody has to work, and most people don't love their jobs, at least not all the time, but one way or another people try to find some dignity in it. Dresser's characters' jobs are only worthy of mockery in the play, and any attempt to find some dignity or importance in their work is derided as pretension. Unfortunately, most of our jobs are closer to these characters' than, say, a playwright or a TV writer, a distinct pretension that Dresser seems oblivious to on his own part.
Perhaps worse is Dresser's desire to see all the evils of corporate culture as emanating from small people trying to seem big. Corporations are stifling and indifferent because of what they are, not because of the people who work there. Taking potshots at incompetent bosses is what happy hour's for, but in a satire it's a straw-man argument. In real life, that incompetent boss of yours is just as likely to stick with you through thick and thin as the awesome boss is to lay you off with bureaucratic efficiency when the diktat comes down from above. But Dresser likes his good guys and bad guys, so much so that he doesn't bother exploring Merkin's moral compromises for what they are: a man throwing someone else under the bus in order to secure a happier future for himself and his family.
But in the end, all this has to be balanced against the phenomenal performances by Wright and Hirsch. These two actors tackle their roles with aplomb, and Hirsch nails his performance. His years of experience show, and he and Wright have real chemistry that keeps the play racing at a clip. Watching this play is a great way to spend an evening, but it just doesn't quite rise above entertainment and leaves you wondering why the script couldn't be a bit darker and more unsparing. Alas, major theatres—to borrow some business-speak popular at this writer's last corporate job—hate "going negative."
